He delivers the afflicted by their affliction and opens their ear by adversity.
– Job 36:15
What a verse to think about and ponder. Consider in the whole of the Bible how God turns affliction for our good, how God works in our hearts and our lives through adversity. That’s a reality we see all over the Bible.
Job 36:15 encourages us to rely on the grace of God.
Think 2 Corinthians 12, when Paul is pleading before God, for God to remove this thorn from his flesh, and God says, my grace is sufficient for you. My power will be made perfect in your weakness. In other words, I have good designs, loving designs for you in this thorn, so trust in me. And that’s easier said than done so many times, isn’t it? When we go through hard times, when we go through affliction or adversity to trust that God is working all this together for our good, and so if you’re walking through affliction or adversity right now, I just want to encourage you with this verse to lean into God in his grace, his power.
Let his power be made perfect in your weakness where you are weak. Trust that he is strong and experience his strength in ways you would not be able to experience apart from your weakness, apart from even affliction, and adversity. He opens our ears by adversity. Open your ears, say to God: God, I don’t understand why this is happening, but I’m trusting in you so my ears are open to you. Help me to know you more. Lord, help me to grow in you. Help me to see what you’re saying.
Speak to me through your Word, through your Holy Spirit. God is honored in prayers like that as we walk through adversity, knowing that he is good and loving and wise and powerful, and he is working. Even those things you’re walking through are the things you find yourself walking through one day in the future, and he will ultimately deliver you and you will have known him, his strength, his peace, his love, and his wisdom in greater ways than you knew before.
Job 36:15 reminds us God draws us closer to Him in affliction.
God, may it be so. God, we pray, do all the work in us that you desire to do, to draw us closer to you and to the prize, the reward, the joy, the strength, the peace that is found in you alone that supersedes this world that far transcends the circumstances of this world. Oh God, we open our ears to you and we say, teach us, mold us more into the image of Jesus. We know this is the good purpose.
You’re working for us according to your Word in Romans 8:28–30, that you’re working all things together for our good, that we might be conformed into the image of your son, that we become more like Jesus, who we know for the joy set before him, endured adversity and affliction on the cross. Oh God, we pray. Help us to grow in our knowledge of you, our experience of you, our enjoyment of you, and our trust in you.
Help us to grow into the image of Jesus more through our affliction and adversity. God, I pray that over everybody who’s walking through hard days right now. God, I think about circumstances I’ve walked through in recent days. I praise you for how you have taught me and you’ve worked for my good in so many ways. So I pray that over every person who’s walking through those kinds of days now… Or in preparation for those kinds of days in the future. We trust that you are our deliverer. Affliction and adversity will ultimately draw us closer to you as we keep our eyes fixed on you. Help us to do that, oh God,
Prayer for the Kabyle Berber People
We pray for people who are walking through adversity and affliction without the hope, the peace, and the strength that is found in you. Jesus, we pray specifically today for the Kabyle Berber people… Over 7 million of them are in Morocco, Tunisia, Western Libya, and the coastal mountain regions of Northern Algeria. God, we pray for Kabyle Berber men and women and children as they walk through adversity and affliction. We pray for the spread of the gospel to them… That they might have the hope of Jesus, that they might know the love of Jesus. God, please cause this Berber people group to be reached with the good news of your grace. We pray all of this according to your word in Job 36:15. In Jesus’ name, amen.
David Platt serves as a pastor in metro Washington, D.C. He is the founder of Radical.
David received his Ph.D. from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary and is the author of Don’t Hold Back, Radical, Follow Me, Counter Culture, Something Needs to Change, Before You Vote, as well as the multiple volumes of the Christ-Centered Exposition Commentary series.
Along with his wife and children, he lives in the Washington, D.C. metro area.
